Daily Archives: August 3, 2013

Quick summary
3rd place behind Mike Olheiser (Cashcall Mortgage) and Payne Griffin (Marx and Bensdorf). I read recently that you weren’t supposed to start your posts with podium pictures, but I’m really, really proud of this one so please excuse the blogging faux pas.

The details
I finished up my ride for Team Red, White, and Blue on Tuesday and didn’t touch my bike until Friday with Craig from Brick Alley giving it a thorough overhaul after 862 miles of pavement, dirt, and gravel and my legs getting a much, much needed rest. Josiah and I biked over to the bikeshop (on my old Scott), Josiah’s first “commute” on somewhat busier roads. I came home with the Litespeed, and Kristine stopped by on her way home from work to pick up the Scott.

I wasn’t sure how such an intense effort as a not-quite 40K time trial would be on my legs, and as it turns out it really hurt. I ended up doing the time trial mostly in Zone 4 heartrate because the pain in my quads was really bad. I focused on trying to keep good aerodynamic form on the downhills and across the top of the uphills but stood up on most of the smaller hills to give my legs a bit of a break as I torqued hard on the bars. Initially I was targetting a 315 watt average, but that became unreasonable after a few minutes so I basically continued to target that as a maximum for the flat sections and then running 250-275 watts on the downhills and 350 watts on the steeper uphills.

All of this meant that I was slow on the way out. Mike started 30 seconds behind me and passed me within the first 2 or 3 minutes of the race. Payne started right in front of me and was long out of sight. Travis Sherman had started one minute in front of me and was also long out of sight. At the turnaround, it looked like Travis was still about a minute ahead of me but my legs started to feel better (i.e., less pain) the farther I got into the ride so I cranked it up a bit on the way back and ended up catching Travis across the top of the Firetower climb. I’m thinking that with the freshest possible legs I could have cut maybe another minute from my time but that still wouldn’t have put me anywhere in the ballpark of the TT crushers Mike and Payne.

Afterwards, it was fun to chat with all the riders from across the state and several from out of state including Greg Miller from Knoxville came down to partner with Larry Gunter to win the BVI tandem state crown. Also, Ryan Boyle came over from Georgia and raced strong in the T2 Para category (see photos below).